Health Care Bill Would Vastly Expand IRS Power; CBO Ordered to Base Cost Estimate on False Assumptions
“House health care bill dangerously expands IRS power,” say a tax law professor and GOP leaders. The Washington Examiner says that “16,500 more IRS agents” will be “needed to enforce Obamacare.” That’s “the biggest expansion of the IRS since World War II,” needed to “to collect, examine and audit new tax information mandated on families and small businesses.”
Governors of both political parties assail the health care bill as a job-killer that will drive up state deficits, increase taxes, and harm the economy. The governors of New York and California warned that “their states will be crushed by billions in new costs.”
The most recent version of the health care bill contains additional tax increases and Medicare cuts. It dramatically increases taxes on investors by adding a new 3.8 percent tax on investment income (much higher than the 2.9 percent previously proposed by Obama), but few newspapers have reported that.
The Washington Post falsely claims that the CBO says the health care bill will save $1.2 trillion over its second decade, but the CBO says the figure is not from it (it’s from congressional Democrats). Amazingly, the CBO, under orders from Democratic leaders, has understated the bill’s cost for the first decade by including the present fiscal year — in which ObamaCare is not yet law and thus has no costs — while excluding its last year from cost calculations. The result was to reduce the projected price tag for the bill from $1.2 trillion to $940 billion.
While the CBO has scored the health care bill as not increasing the federal deficit, thanks to the many tax increases in the bill, it has done so only by accepting many accounting gimmicks that even pro-Obama journalists have admitted are deceptive and conceal the bill’s enormous cost and the fact that it will massively increase the deficit. The New York Times‘ David Brooks, once a staunch Obama supporter, now says the bill’s drafters were “corrupted by power” and calls arguments for the bill “unbelievable” and “insane.”
Earlier, health care cost expert James C. Capretta explained how “Obamacare Is A Budgetary Disaster” that will cost at least $1.4 trillion more than promised.
The Congressional Budget Office, which refused to question Obama’s gimmicks to lowball the cost of his health care plan, nevertheless admits that “President Obama’s policies would add more than $9.7 trillion to the national debt over the next decade.”
There are $3,000,000,000,000 in tax increases in Obama’s budget. But he’s spending money at such a furious pace that the deficit will skyrocket anyway: “The president’s budget would borrow 42 cents for each dollar spent in 2010,” and “double the national debt over the next decade.” Obama recently ran up the largest budget deficit in history, by a huge margin.
The revised health-care bill would add a new 3.8 percent tax on investment income for individuals who make $200,000 or more, and households making $250,000 or more. More importantly, it would also impose many middle-class tax increases, such as taxes on uninsured individuals, on cosmetic surgery, on medical devices, and on certain health care plans.
ObamaCare would reduce medical innovation, raise taxes, drive up insurance premiums, and break campaign promises. It would cut the quality of care, while imposing restrictions that failed when tried at the state level. It ignores advice from experts about how to cut costs.
A retired federal judge says that the tactic congressional leaders are using to rush Obamacare into law violates Supreme Court rulings and the Constitution.